Chapter 21 Sabrina, My Mate
TWENTY-ONE
SAbrINA, MY MATE
Darolus
My eyes snap open. I take a trembling breath and my lungs fill with Sabrina’s heady scent.
But smelling my blood among it, I tense and lean up to peer around.
Finding myself in an unfamiliar space, I groan as a sharp pain strikes me from my chest all the way to my back.
My blood sharpens in the air and I lie down with a grunt.
Against me and between my side and tail is Sabrina, slumbering deeply, her hair partially covering her face. Stilling as I peer down at her, she seems slighter than usual, more frail. Shifting some of her hair off of her face, her features were strained and her body was fidgeting, trembling.
Noticing she’s cold, I shift her closer to my side.
Flicking my eyes to the open doorway beyond her, I sense another presence. Another female. One who I have not seen nor spoken to in a very long time.
“Melsya,” I call out, my voice gruff and low.
I hear her long before I see her appear in the doorway, lit up in the soft blue glow from the light outside.
“Darolussss,” she responds.
“I did not mean to attack you.” It is not hard to guess where I am or how Sabrina and I got here. I can smell the naga females all around me, knowing I had to have been brought deep within their domain. Though finally seeing a part of it for myself, I am unhappy.
She tilts her head at Sabrina and I shift my tail closer around her. “I now understand you were trying to protect your mate.”
My mate. “Yessss.” Whatever Sabrina might think I am to her, or she to me, she is my mate. There is no other for me, not even a female naga I would defend over her. “She is mine.”
“I did not expect you to find her when we left her. She was not quite within the border of your territory.”
I look at Melsya sharply. “It was you who hurt her?”
“We knocked her unconsioussss, yessss.”
“You are not supposed to go above ground,” I argue. How did I not sense them? Smell them, catch their tracks? I’d searched for a male naga for days, having not found a single hint of him, only to discover it has been Melsya and the other females all along? “You risk all of us.”
“We have our wayssss.”
“Your ways or not, you should not have brought me down here. You take too many risks. There are not only males to worry about now, there are humans. Nagas are being taken by them and their skycrafts are numerous. Not only that, there are now clouds.”
“I know.” She flicks her eyes to Sabrina then upward. “She told me some of what is happening.” Then she hisses and refaces me. “I made sure you were mated before we allowed you to continue living. Thanks to her, she is the only reason we risked ourselves in the first place. She cares for you.”
Hissing, I bare my fangs at her. “Now that I am awake, we will leave and you will stay beneath the ground, where you are safest. Not only are there humans and their skycrafts to watch out for, the forest is spreading faster now than ever before and others… males might come. I do not sense any of the other females nearby.” I shift to lift Sabrina and wince. “Where are they?”
“Do not move,” Melsya snaps. “Remember what I stabbed you with.”
I drop my hand to my wound with a cringe.
“A silver spear,” I say.
She hits her tail on the floor.
Recalling the blade sliding into me, bones and all with ease, and the shocking internal impulses burning me from within, I grimace, feeling the prickling sensation needling me everywhere at once all over again. I shudder, unnerved by the ghost sensations materializing in my body.
I lie back on the ground, knowing I may never fully recover from the wound. I may feel it, in some capacity, for the rest of my life.
“I will leave you to get some rest.” Melsya slips away.
Shifting Sabrina closer regardless of the internal ache, I doze alongside her, waiting for my wound to close and her to wake up, not fully falling asleep.
I rouse when I hear the other females return, answering my question as to where they are.
One of them brings me food and warily hands it over to me with the tip of her tail.
Fear and distrust coursing through her eyes.
I take the rodent from her and devour it whole, using the water she brings me afterward to rinse the unpleasant flavor down, preferring straight meat to the crunch of bones, stringy sinew, and fur.
By the time I am done, Sabrina is sitting upright and staring at me.
“Gross.”
I slide my tail out from around her to give her more space. “You are finally awake.”
She rubs her eyes and I notice the black around them is smudged. I wonder when she last had time to do her coloring and how long I have been unconscious. “I can say the same to you.”
Shifting back and farther up the wall behind me, I hold in my hiss, settling lower so I may stare at her better while not disturbing my wound.
Her eyes move between me and the gash. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yessss.” I take in her pale face, awash in a soft blue light, noticing her saddened expression.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Coiling my tail in a close arch around her, I shuffle her closer, searching her expression some more. “Why?” Dropping my gaze to her body, she appears unhurt, if not a little bedraggled.
She looks down at her hands, bringing one up to clasp around one of her necklaces. “For getting you hurt.”
“You did not get me hurt,” I huff with a hiss, setting my head back on the wall. “Melsya hurt me. We have already spoken.”
Her lips open and close. “That’s not… entirely what I mean.
I should’ve waited for you but I didn’t, I chose to leave.
I was scared. I thought it might have been my only chance…
” She shakes her head as I try to understand.
“If I’d just given myself some time to think first, I think I would’ve waited, but fuck—”
“What are you talking about?”
Her brows furrow as she looks at me. “I left. I fled, Darolus. You got hurt and my crewmates got killed because I was fleeing, fleeing from you. If I hadn’t called out to them, hadn’t heard them…
none of this would’ve happened, do you understand?
I fucked up, and because of that I got you hurt.
I’m so sorry.” She reaches for me but pulls her hand away at the last second.
She swam under the water and to the other side? “You jumped into the water?” She hates the water.
“Yes…”
I growl out loudly. “No more rissskssss.” Has every female gone mad? I glance behind Sabrina knowing the others have since left upon her waking, including Melsya.
“No more risks, I promise. Darolus… we need to talk about something.”
“Are you hurt?”
Her expression twists in confusion. “Hurt?”
“You have not told me yet if you have been hurt,” I snap, searching her body for wounds.
“No. I’m not hurt. Nearly drowning was pretty frightening, but I survived. We need to talk about—”
Knowing I could have lost her, I haul her to me, bracing against the sharp pain radiating from my wound to kiss her.
She clutches my shoulders and shifts in my arms, careful to not touch my gash as she brings her knees closer.
Holding her, I deepen the kiss when she hitches for breath.
I press my tongue inside her. My middle stirs as the appendage within my tail quickens with a rush of blood.
She is alive and well, and in my arms.
I could have lost her.
Running her hands over my shoulders, she cups the back of my head as she allows my tongue deeper inside her mouth. Licking hers in gentle strokes, I pet her on the inside. Groaning, I suddenly need to take her to our nest and pet other places inside her as well, far away from prying eyes.
She pushes at my shoulders and breaks the kiss. “Darolus, we need to talk about what I did. I feel bad.”
Her eyes gleam with unease… and fear?
A thought forms. “Why you did what?” Is she afraid of me? Have I been reading her wrong all along? Searching her expression again as her gaze drops, I second-guess what I see, dismissing her worry, though still stuck on her fear.
She shakes her head.
“Ssssabrina, what is wrong?” I ask, finding her silence more worrisome than her fleeing from me.
She looks back at me. “Nothing. I was just thinking about my answer. I… I don’t know what I was going to say.”
“You do not know?”
“I think… maybe it’s because I’m afraid.”
Afraid.
The moment the word leaves her mouth, I stiffen, my thoughts reeling, having never wanted to hear those words from her mouth.
Others have been afraid of me my entire existence, since I fell to the floor and crawled out from underground with the rest of them.
The only differences between me and them, besides my scales and coloring, was my size and lack of clan.
No others of my kind came out from under the ground, and when I later went back in search of them, I found only the rotting corpses of the hundreds of nagas who did not make it.
When she opens her lips to say something more, I hiss deeply to stop her.
“Darolus?”
“If you fear me so much, why save me? Why stay?”
“Because that’s what you would do for me and… because that’s what I wanted to do. I’m not afraid of you, Darolus, I’m afraid of not knowing what’s going to happen, of wondering if I’m going to spend the rest of my life underground.”
“I see. If I had not come back when I did…”
Her face falls at my words.
She does not want to be with me. I see that now. She was only pretending until she had the opportunity or courage to make her escape. If I had let her, she would have gone long ago.
Unable to hear any more, I hiss again when she tries to speak. “Leave, female. If that is what you wish, I will not stop you.”
“Darolus…”
Grimacing through the pain, I rise to my full height, shifting onto my weight and away from the wall to hover over her. “Leave!”
Sabrina shuffles and straightens, rising to her feet and backing away to the door. When she tries to speak yet again, I snap at her, slamming my tail against the ground. She stumbles out of the room and out of my sight.
Settling back down on the ground, I clench my hands into fists and listen to her footsteps retreat, stopping myself from going after her.